Why Women’s Football Is Still Undervalued

The uncomfortable truths the industry can no longer ignore

Women’s football is enjoying unprecedented momentum: record-breaking attendances, surging digital audiences and a level of cultural relevance that men’s sport increasingly struggles to replicate. Yet beneath the optimism lies a more uncomfortable reality. Despite clear demand, the sport remains dramatically undervalued. This has little to do with the quality of the game and has everything to do with the systems governing it.

As became clear across multiple panels at the RAISE Global Women’s Sport Conference 2025, women’s football is being forced to scale within structures never designed to support it. A 21st-century growth asset is operating inside a legacy, male-dominated football ecosystem built for a different audience, different economics and different incentives.

And it is this imbalance, more than anything else, that continues to suppress the sport’s true value.

1- The women’s game has outgrown the structures holding it back

Few voices articulate this more clearly than Bex Smith, former professional footballer, investor and board advisor, speaking on the Business of Sport podcast (Episode 92).

“Most clubs don’t really understand what their fan base is. There’s no sustainability in the financial modeling of these clubs.”

— Bex Smith, Business of Sport Podcast

Bex’s diagnosis goes deeper than simple knowledge gaps. At its core, the issue is organisational dependency.

“The reason why that is because they’re stuck in the men’s club still.”
— Bex Smith

Across Europe, many women’s teams continue to operate without independent leadership structures. No president. No dedicated commercial lead. No full-time marketing or social media function. Commercial growth is treated as an afterthought rather than a strategic priority.

“You pay the salary from the men’s club and 5% of your time you should work on women’s partnership sales.”
— Bex Smith

This model makes sustained commercial growth structurally impossible. Women’s football is more modern, more culturally aligned and more growth-ready than men’s football, yet it remains positioned as an “add-on” within a system designed for a different era and a different commercial logic.

This point resonated strongly throughout the RAISE conference. During the Reality Check: Valuations, Hype and Hard Truths in Women’s Sport panel, Lindsey Eckhouse, Chief Revenue Officer at Mercury 13, explained why independence is fundamental when evaluating assets:

“FC Como Women’s is an independent women’s club, and the reason we were excited to buy into that was the ability to fully rebrand it and create something that almost was a football brand for the next hundred years.”
— Lindsey Eckhouse, CRO, Mercury 13

Growth is happening, but often through a pipeline that leaks at every stage. Clubs are absorbing rising elite-performance costs (higher player salaries, increased international travel, deeper European competition) without the commercial infrastructure that men’s football has spent decades refining.

2- Scheduling is the silent value killer

Among the structural challenges discussed at RAISE, scheduling consistently emerged as one of the most damaging and least discussed commercial constraints.

Leaders across multiple sessions pointed to the same issues: inconsistent kick-off times, late fixture confirmations and fragmented coordination between leagues, broadcasters and clubs.

Speaking during the Football Focus: Inside the WSL session, Zarah Al-Kudcy, Chief Revenue Officer of WSL Football, acknowledged the scale of the problem:

“I think the biggest challenge we have is the scheduling period. There is a lot to even just work out where you find us.”
— Zarah Al-Kudcy, CRO, WSL Football

Women’s football audiences skew younger, more digital-first and more habit-driven than almost any other major sport. These fans do not discover matches accidentally; they build routines. When those routines are repeatedly disrupted, one of the sport’s strongest competitive advantages is eroded.

The result is millions in lost value because the system fails to offer a stable, predictable product.

3- Women’s football still lacks a clear commercial identity

Another recurring theme at RAISE was identity. Investors don’t know what exactly they are buying into. A sport? A social movement? A CSR initiative? A high-growth media asset? A commercial property still tied to the men’s side?

During the Reality Check panel, Lindsey Eckhouse addressed this directly:

“We like a lot of independence from the men’s side so that we can rebrand and change how we approach things, certainly marketing, communications, and reaching out to that specific target audience.”
— Lindsey Eckhouse

She also warned against blindly replicating legacy models:

“There isn’t one recipe or one model… it’s fascinating to see these different approaches.”
— Lindsey Eckhouse

Without a clearly defined product, women’s football struggles to attract the kind of institutional, scalable, long-term capital that accelerates entire industries rather than individual clubs.

4- Media rights are not the saviour

At RAISE in September 2025,  Zarah Al-Kudcy challenged the long-held assumption that broadcast rights must be the primary engine of sustainability.

“We can’t be hanging on to media rights being the answer for all of us in a bizarre way, because most women’s sport has had to be more creative where it looks for revenue. I actually think it puts us in a stronger position for longer-term financial sustainability because we’re not going to be relying on media rights deals.”

— Zarah Al Kudcy, Chief Revenue Officer, WSL Football

While men’s football has become structurally dependent on broadcast income, often to its detriment, women’s football has been forced to diversify earlier. That constraint, Al-Kudcy suggested, may ultimately become an advantage.

She also dismantled the assumption that digital-first strategies undermine broadcasters:

“94% of our views on our YouTube channel are for non live content, which means that we’re not a threat to our broadcasters. We actually can complement and supplement their live storytelling with our YouTube channel, which also drove six figures of advertising revenue”
— Zarah Al-Kudcy

The implication is clear: women’s football is not a zero-sum media product. It is a multi-touchpoint ecosystem spanning live, digital, social and on-demand environments.

5- Scheduling, stadiums and the operational reality clubs face​

Al-Kudcy also highlighted how inherited frameworks around broadcast windows and stadium access directly limit revenue generation:

“If the women’s game exists in that framework, it then also has to exist in finding the gaps for TV broadcast, finding the gaps in stadium use, because so many clubs are now using the main stadia for most of their home games. And that creates its own challenges.”
— Zarah Al Kudcy, Chief Revenue Officer, WSL Football

While purpose-built, mid-sized stadiums are often presented as the ideal solution, feasibility remains a major barrier:

“In an ideal world, everyone would follow the lead of Brighton and clubs in the NWSL and build a purpose-built new medium-sized ground, but that’s unfortunately quite unrealistic for a lot of clubs.”
— Zarah Al Kudcy, Chief Revenue Officer, WSL Football

When clubs lack control over scheduling, venue access and broadcast prioritisation, predictable revenue becomes impossible and valuation suffers accordingly.

6- The audience is the most culturally valuable in global sport​

Perhaps the most overlooked factor in women’s football’s undervaluation is cultural relevance.

The sport speaks directly to the audiences global brands are most eager to reach: Gen Z and young Millennials. These fans prioritise inclusion, authenticity, access and purpose and women’s football delivers all four more naturally than men’s sport.

Yet the commercial offer remains rooted in old-world sponsorship logic: boards, logos, perimeter LEDs. Brands increasingly want IP, community, co-authorship and cultural alignment but clubs often lack the capability to meet that demand.

This disconnect between brand appetite and organisational capacity is one of the biggest reasons capital is not flowing faster.

What’s really holding the sport back isn’t product, it’s alignment

Across every session – governance, scheduling, infrastructure, sponsorship, ownership and league economics – the same truth surfaced: belief is universal but alignment is not.

Leagues, clubs, broadcasters, owners and commercial partners are pulling in different directions, constrained by systems designed for men’s football rather than the reality of the women’s game.

RAISE Football exists to confront these misalignments. By bringing together owners, investors, leagues, brands, and tech partners, the event tackles the structural, commercial, and cultural gaps that continue to hold back women’s football.

In March 2026, RAISE Football will convene the leaders and decision-makers shaping the next decade of the sport. The discussion will not offer off-the-shelf solutions but it will force alignment, uncover hidden value and accelerate serious capital into the women’s game.

To register your interest, click here.

To discuss partnership opportunities, contact: caitlynn@raisewomensport.com